Resident Evil 3 tested with 10 video cards

After the critical and public success of Resident Evil 2 it was almost inevitable for Capcom don't even think about a remake for Resident Evil 3, the game that in 1999 marked an era on PlayStation 2 with the title of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. The new Resident Evil, on the market today, borrows from Resident Evil 2 game mechanics, balance and style, also with regards to narration. Players impersonate the iconic Jill Valentine.

In an attempt to escape from Raccoon City during the zombie apocalypse, players must go in search of very few resources and weapons and sporadic to protect themselves from zombies, while in the vast majority of circumstances it is better to avoid direct contact. The internal crafting system allows you to combine various types of objects to create ammunition and vital resources. Players must also explore Raccon City and solve puzzles to try to upgrade their equipment and make it suitable for survival. Resident Evil 3 can be purchased on Amazon.

The game reveals some limits, not confirming the playful offer expressed by Resident Evil 2. Mainly in terms of longevity, given that the story is completed in just about 5 hours. Resident Evil fans will miss some parts, inexplicably cut from the classic from which it takes inspiration. Furthermore, the game is unable to convey the same sense of anguish as its predecessor. Despite this interesting on the level of gameplay mechanics and on the technical level.

Resident Evil 3 uses the graphics engine RE Engine already admired in Resident Evil 7, Devil May Cry 5 in the recent remake of Resident Evil 2. Basically it is a technology that comes from MT Framework or, better to say, the name of the latter as it passes through the new generation. The game worlds of Resident Evil 3 are very detailed and give that feeling of realism that the players of Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 2 know very well, greatly increasing the involvement. At the same time, however, it should be emphasized that the experience is not completely stable with all the video cards with which we tried it: indeed, cases of "frame drop" were not uncommon, especially with those cards with little memory on -board.

AMD and CAPCOM worked together to offer players using Radeon GPU better support and performance. Among other things, Resident Evil 3 with Radeon GPU supports FidelityFX CAS, or the filter of dynamic sharpening hardware-agnostic to improve visual details in all circumstances, useful in this case to allow players to grasp any detail even in the many dark areas that characterize the game world of Resident Evil 3. AMD FreeSync Premium Proinstead, it offers uncompromising gameplay in terms of tearing, with a rendering HDR accurate and one Low-Framerate Compensation to contain stuttering.

The menu of graphic options Resident Evil 3 very complete and presents some ideas for innovation. Not only does it show the effects of the graphic change that is about to be made in the lower right corner, but it also indicates what consequences there will be in terms of video memory used, workload, and image quality, models, lighting and effects graphics. The indication on the video memory is expressed in orange if the consumption conditions are at the limit and in red if it exceeds, with presumed strong impact on performance. Unlike DooM Eternal, however, game execution is not inhibited in case of excessive VRAM consumption.

In Resident Evil 3 we have three presets graphics, which are called: Performance Priority, Balanced Configuration and Maximum Configuration. They roughly correspond to the "low", "medium" and "high" settings of the various graphic options that we will examine throughout the article. We tested them with the Radeon RX 5700 XT. Clearly, with the "Performance priority" setting, the graphics are reduced to the minimum terms and the performance reaches a frame rate that is 90 fps at that with maximum quality. Here's what the impact on performance.

As regards the textures, for each setting the menu of the graphic options indicates the approximate consumption of VRAM. The quality differences are not striking and, in fact, here is the impact on performance. We tried to change the texture setting only, going to change the parameter to understand how the performance varies in the face of a different memory occupation according to the game settings. As you can see from the graph, that parameter does not affect performance at all, so focus on other variables to optimize the frame rate.

Comparison between the minimum setting available for textures and the maximum.

We went carefully in search of the effects of AMD FidelityFX CAS and in the end we managed to identify something on the textures of objects that are particularly distant from the observation point, as in this case. The driver is obviously doing something: as we know, he adjusts the contrast ratio in such a way as to improve detail. The implementation in Resident Evil 3 for quite secondary and not as effective as for those games where the edges of the objects are very sharp (like Borderlands 3).

The implementation of theanti-aliasing, however much it leads us to make considerations already expressed for other games of the past. We have four anti-aliasing options to choose from: SMAA, FXAA, TAA and FXAA + TAA. the filter that acts over time to make a difference, as it is much more effective in smoothing the edges, although responsible for a certain blurring of the image. SMAA and FXAA are filters that have very little impact on performance, but their contribution in terms of almost zero image sharpness. Note, however, that the detail examined here is the result of a 100% zoom on the image (which applies to almost all comparisons in this article).

As for theenvironmental occlusion, or the contact shadows between adjacent polygons, we have three options available: HDAO, SSAO and HBAO +. As always happens HBAO + the option that brings the greatest graphic benefits, with a reduced performance impact. Generated on the basis of the polygonal composition of the environment, the environmental occlusion is very important to guarantee the fidelity of the game scenarios.

Very beautiful volumetric lights of the RE Engine, because they give depth to almost any game scene.

Among the options also the possibility to adjust the quality of the Mesh. As you can see, it mainly affects the determination of the effects supplied, such as shadows. In any case, the level of realism of Jill Valentine's face is impressive.

The Shadows they are very precise in Resident Evil 3. Here you can see the difference in the level of detail between the "Minimum" and "Maximum" settings.

Resident Evil 3 has defined options "Image Quality" which change the resolution at which the images are natively rendered. Although after downscaling to the final resolution selected, in the case of settings higher than 100% there are still significant benefits on the overall quality. Don't make too much of your mouth, however, at the 200% setting that we are showing you here, because unplayable with almost all the cards we try.

Among the most striking effects we certainly find i reflexes: here's what happens if they are enabled or not.

Benchmark

We tried Resident Evil 3 with the "Maximum configuration" quality option in DirectX 12 on a platform composed as follows: MSI Z370 Tomahawk, Intel Core i7-9700K processor, 16 GB of DDR4-3600 memory and a 250 GB Samsung 860 EVO SSD. We tested the AMD and Nvidia cards respectively AMD Adrenalin 20.4.1 Beta and Nvidia Game Ready 445.75 WQHL. Unlike DooM Eternal, recently tested, the game allowed us to test even with large textures, which he said exceeded the available graphics memory. Resident Evil 3 can be purchased on Amazon

We tried to carry out the test in a repeatable way (there is no integrated benchmark), in a scenario with a mix of outdoor and indoor scenes, with different zombies and flames throughout the environment. The data you see then refers to that specific path, the frame rates in other scenes may vary.

In Full HD you can see that despite the high quality all the cards allow you to play well, even the GTX 1650 which goes below 60 fps: with a few tricks in the details you can play rather easily over 60 fps.

In WQHD the situation obviously changes. Three cards end up below 60 fps (but for the type of title and the rhythm a false problem), while all the other cards, even those advertised for Full HD with good quality, are doing quite well, like the RX 5600 XT.

In 4K the GTX 1650 throws in the towel. We have noticed crashes that have not allowed us to try it with our settings, but if you look at the RX 5500 XT 4GB below 20 fps, the fact that crashes occurred was good for our eyes, we would have seen far too many shots.

As for the high end of the cards, from RX 5700 onwards, a few tricks are enough to raise the frame rate and enjoy the title in 4K with good performance. Obviously with the RTX 2080 Ti you won't have to do anything.

Finally, we tried the game by disabling the cores of our Core i7-9700K (an 8 core without Hyper-Threading) in order to simulate the behavior with different processors. Obviously not to be understood as an exact performance picture with certain models or with AMD processors with the same number of cores, but simply a more useful test to understand if the game uses the available cores well or not.

The test was carried out with two cards, the RTX 2080 Ti and the GTX 1660 SUPER. With the first we are practically in a CPU limited scenario, and as you see a strange behavior of the title arose with the CPU with only six active cores: we recorded dozens of fps less, while with 4 cores we observed similar performance to the test with CPU with 8 cores enabled.

With the GTX 1660 SUPER instead the results are completely similar, in that the CPU impacts less and the GPU component takes over heavily to dictate the performance. This picture tells us one thing: Resident Evil 3 not born to take advantage of new generation PCs.

To conclude two quick notes: enabling FidelityFX has practically no impact on performance, which is good. You can therefore leave it activated without problems. The game supports DirectX 11, but in our tests we didn't see much sense in setting this API in place of the DX12s.

In our test scene we saw a drop in performance of 6 average fps by testing an RX 5700 with maximum quality in Full HD. Not therefore a parameter that is worth going to modify in case you want more fps, because if you have a powerful video card then the performance will already be high, while in the case of a limited GPU system, then the DX12 should give something more.